Hualien prosecutor has poor record, lawmaker charges

The Hualien prosecutor who has summoned President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) to testify in a vote-buying case has had a poor performance record for more than a decade, a Democratic Progress-ive Party (DPP) lawmaker said yesterday.

At the legislature's Judiciary Committee, DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-lang (蔡煌瑯) questioned Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) about Hualien Prosecutor Lee Tsu-chun's (李子春) performance and said that the summons for the president was unreasonable and ridiculous.

"On a scale from `A' to `D,' Lee has been evaluated as a `B' for the past 14 consecutive years," Tsai said. "Now this prosecutor is summoning the president. Don't you think there is something wrong and inappropriate in the case, minister?"

The justice minister responded that most prosecutors would be given an "A" as long as they had not made any major mistakes in the previous 12 months.

"A prosecutor really has to examine himself to figure out what is going wrong if he was graded "B" for 14 years," he said.

In a statement from the Presidential Office on Wednesday, Chen Shui-bian said he would report to for questioning on Wednesday next week.

Lee is investigating an alleged bribery case in which the DPP candidate in last summer's Hualien County commissioner by-election promised, if elected, to pay a monthly NT$5,000 service allowance to Aboriginal chiefs.

Tsai said he hoped that State Public Prosecutor-General Lu Jen-fa (盧仁發) would ask Lee to summon People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) because Soong was the first government official to issue monthly service allowances to Aboriginal chiefs when he was Taiwan Provincial governor in 1997.

"Soong created the `service allowance,' so I believe that he knows it better than everybody else," Tsai said. "Since the president was summoned, Soong should be summoned too."